Thoughts on the infinate abyss that is life

Folding@Home Diskless cluster

For a very long time (about 11 years… wow) since I was in high school, I have been a proud supporter of Folding@Home. It is a great project not only because of the backend research it helps with, but also the technical aspects of their distributed system.

But I have always wanted to run it diskless, just to see if I could. Well, I finally had a need, time and the resources to try it…. and after much hair pulling, I did it!

I have run a few diskless systems before, but it was always live media. This is slightly different.

Why? Why the hell are you doing this?
Recently I had about 60 servers doing nothing after they were used for memory and disk testing. Rather than just unracking them, I thought I would try this.

So the goals:

Easy. Quick. Simple. Dirty if need be. This is designed to be temporary.

Be diskless

Each node should be able to be booted quickly and not have to be checked (eg SSH)

Use a long DHCP lease time, it prevents it renewing the leases unnecessarily.

Boot up one of your nodes and make sure you get CentOS running before you proceed

A quick note on how this SHOULD work

So from here, you should create a installed environment for each of your nodes and modify the boot line on PXE for each node by MAC address to point to the correct location. Each node would then have its own installed environment and you’re done.

BUT. I didn’t like that idea, I wanted one installed environment to share because (per the goals) this is a quick, dirty, temporary solution.

Installing F@H to the diskless environment

The next bit assumes that you have booted a diskless node and it works and that you are going to either accept this as quick and dirty setup OR you are going to amend this guide to do it properly.

Download the latest F@H client from the F@H website for CentOS and then run